Travelogue: Shrewsbury

After Dublin, we took the ferry to Holyhead and then the train to Shrewsbury. After a very rocky crossing during which I slept and Sarah feasted on brie and grapes, we discovered that we had not only left the sun in Ireland but found all the rain we had eluded there. It rained almost continually during our time in Shrewsbury.

So why Shrewsbury? That's the question I get from virtually everyone. Well, I knew I didn't want to spend all of Saturday travelling, so we needed an overnight spot between Holyhead and Stratford-Upon-Avon. When I started looking at the map and Googling on town names, the fact that the Brother Cadfael series was set in Shrewsbury Abbey (in the 12th century) and that it boasted a lot of original Tudor structures made Shrewsbury a clear winner.

One of the fun aspects of visiting Shrewsbury is that it wasn't tuned up for tourists, at least as far as I could tell. We wandered through town the afternoon we arrived, in the rain. Then had the best dinner of our entire trip at a lovely restaurant called The Cornhouse--we liked it so much that we returned for the cheese plate for lunch the next day.

Another high point of Shrewsbury were the candy shops--if Dublin has a pub on every corner, Shrewsbury has a candy shop on every other corner. We fell in love with Thornton's Summer Collection, having succumbed to a free sample of the lemon meringue taste treat, and bought a box for the family back home and a box for the weary travellers.

Sunday morning we checked out the Abbey, and lo and behold, we were just in time for the service. Once we poked our heads in the door, there was no turning back, and I'm very glad we stayed. I have never attended a Church of England service before so imagine my thrill when I actually got to hear the marriage banns being read! I also enjoyed the choir immensely, and afterwards asked for and received permission to take pictures inside. Sarah took pictures and I shopped in the gift shop, where I bought some wonderful stained glass book marks and a couple of Brother Cadfael mysteries, which the clerk stamped with a Shrewsbury Abbey stamp for me.



After the Abbey, we walked up the Severn, in the rain, to the Castle, which ended up being a bit of a disappointment as it houses a regimental museum containing hundreds of variations of the same basic uniform. I'm not big on military stuff to begin with so a little went a long way for me.



Then on to the train station, which was quite photogenic, as you can see...


...after that wonderful cheese board at the Cornhouse, and on to Stratford, where the sun was waiting for us.

Mary, Queen of Scots revisited

Over the long weekend, I got to indulge my weakness for period films and I watched again for the first time Mary, Queen of Scots, one of my all-time favorites and one of the first period dramas that I saw as a kid. It has been over thirty years since I first saw this movie, but it still holds up beautifully for me.

Despite Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren, Glenda Jackson will always be Elizabeth I for me, which is interesting because despite the title of the movie, I came away from watching this as a pre-teen with an Elizabeth-over-Mary bias that still holds true to this day. Like Elizabeth, I can't help despising Mary for her weak head and wayward heart. Vanessa Redgrave plays up this side of Mary beautifully, and I couldn't help but remember the beautiful Natasha Richardson as I watched her mother as a young woman.

It was also a surprise for me to see Timothy Dalton as Henry Lord Darnley. When I saw this movie eons ago, I remember that Darnley made my skin crawl, as he is suppposed to, but I don't know that it ever entered my consciousness in the intervening years that Dalton played this role and did it so well.

Having visiting Holyroodhouse and Edinburgh Castle less than a month ago, I was particularly aware of how well they reproduced the scenes that took place in these locations.

















Rizzio's murder burned in my brain when I witnessed it when I first watched the movie, and I was surprised to find that this time around Rizzio himself was a far more likeable character than I remembered. I had always categorized him as a Rasputin type, but that's not how he was portrayed in this movie.

Another scene that I remember vividly from my youth was the scene at the beginning when Mary and Francis II of France are boating and he is struck by a seizure. That terrified me then, and it still does.

Back to portrayals of Elizabeth and Mary, I credit my early viewing of this movie as placing me firmly in the Elizabeth camp, and much as I love Austen, I never could wrap my head around her allegiance to Mary. Maybe she really is more of a Romantic than I have given her credit for.

Maybe I'll get A Man for All Seasons (Special Edition)
next. I remember seeing that movie shortly after Mary, Queen of Scots as a kid, and it also made a deep impression.

Travelogue: Tara and Newgrange

Sarah and I agreed that this is our favorite photo from the entire trip, and it was snapped atop the Hill of Tara during a brief stop on the bus tour we took out of Dublin to Newgrange. While we really enjoyed Dublin, we are both more comfortable in the country than the city and this scene has it all—lush, green rolling hills, dotted with sheep and farmhouses, and the odd church or folly gracing the horizon.

According to the pamphlet we picked up, Tara is a royal place where 142 kings reigned in the Name of Tara, a sacred place known as a dwelling place of the gods where St. Patrick is said to have converted the ancient rulers of Ireland to Christianity, and a Celtic place with settlements and burial mounds dating back to more than 4000 years ago.



After Tara, we boarded the bus and continued on to Newgrange in the Brú na Bóinne, which is Gaelic for Palace of the Boyne, in the Boyne Valley.




There we got to go inside the burial mound at Newgrange.





You enter through the bottom of the two openings, and the passageway slopes upward so that when you are in the center of the mound, your feet are even with the bottom of the top opening. At dawn during the winter solstice, sunlight penetrates the top opening, illuminating the entire chamber, which energizes the souls of the people whose ashes are stored within, thereby blessing their descendents.

There is a lottery into which anyone can enter their name to win the privilege to enter the tomb at Newgrange to witness dawn during the winter solstice. We didn’t enter.

One of my favorite tidbits that our guide shared is that the Boyne meanders in such a way that it makes almost a complete circle and within this circle are the huge burial mounds of Newgrange, Dowth, and Knowth. Emanating from these are smaller satellite mounds, and radiating from these smaller mounds are even smaller satellite mounds. Truly a sacred area.

The other cool thing I thought about was how the designs on the stones that surround the mound remind me of classic Celtic scrollwork. A coincidence? I like to think not.

Back to 1599: Looking at Henry the Fifth in Context

Henry the Fifth was first performed in March 1599, immediately after the theaters reopened after being closed for Lent. Hence, it is the first of the plays that James Shapiro examines in its historical context in his book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.). I’ve often read that HV is one of Shakespeare’s weakest plays. It’s been more popular with modern audiences than at any other time since it was first produced—most likely because of the film version with Laurence Olivier, made at the express request of the British government to instill patriotism in the breasts of the movie-going public, and the film version with Kenneth Branagh, made during the British Falklands War. It’s always been a favorite of mine since it was the first Shakespeare play I ever saw—my father took me to the Olivier film when I was about 11 or 12—and I was thoroughly swept away by Olivier as HV. I’ve always been a bit baffled by the critics’s dismissal of HV, but Shapiro does a masterful job of showing it to be not only a capstone of the history plays, but as a catalyst in redirecting Shakespeare’s career as playwright, poet, and shaper of English culture and consciousness.

Kemp/Falstaff, the Globe, end of the War of the Roses Cycle

Shapiro says that as far back 1596, Shakespeare was trying to finish Henry the Fifth, which he had been thinking about for several years.

The scars of revision that Henry the Fifth bear—inconsistencies, locales that are specified then altered, characters that are introduced and then mysteriously disappear, repetitions that seem to be ghostly remnants of earlier drafts—testify to the extent to which Shakespeare’s conception of the play kept changing…As Shakespeare’s melancholy epilogue to Henry the Fifth acknowledges—with its backward glance at a decade’s worth of history plays with which he had entertained Shoreditch audiences—Henry the Fifth marked the end of one stage of his career and the unchartered beginning of another. (p. 20)

When the Chamberlain’s Men performed HIV, p2 at the Curtain, the play closes with an epilogue spoken by Will Kemp, that transitioned neatly into and referenced the bawdy jig that typically closed all Elizabethean plays, comedies as well as tragedies. In the original epilogue, “our humble author” promises to “continue the story.” According to Shapiro, this is the only time that Shakespeare ever shares with his audience what he planned to write next. However, when the Chamberlain’s Men were invited to perform that play at court, Shakespeare revised the epilogue because plays at court could not end with ribald jigs. In the revised epilogue, Shakepeare delivered his own words and in them makes no mention of what his next play will be about and no promise that Kemp will return as Falstaff. Most importantly, he suggests that “playwright and playgoers are bound in a partnership, sharers in a venture.” At this point, Shakespeare and most of the Chamberlain’s Men were building a new theatre of their own, the Globe, and his next play, the one he was currently working on when he wrote and delivered the revised epilogue, was Henry the Fifth, which does not include Falstaff directly (i.e., his death scene is described), Will Kemp in another role, or the typical closing bawdy jig. Shapiro suggests that Shakespeare in this revised epilogue to HIV,p2 prepares his audience for the new course that Henry the Fifth will set him and them (i.e., the playgoing public) on.



As an aside, HIV,p2 was published in 1601, two years after it was first performed, and this publication contains both epilogues. However, the printer left a bit of space between the court (aka Whitehall revised version) and the original Curtain version, indicating that he was aware that there were two separate epilogues. The 1623 folio also includes both versions but without the space between, melding them into a single epilogue. According to Shapiro, “modern-day editors, who ought to know better, have followed suit, leaving the confusion intact and obscuring why and how Shakespeare redirects his art at this time.” (p.36)

“Since at least the eighteenth century, critics have struggled to make sense of Shakespeare’s change of heart about Falstaff. Why would he abandon one of his great creations—especially after promising that we’d see Falstaff again?” Shapiro answers this by saying that

Shakespeare’s decision had nothing to do with character or plot but rather with Kemp and clowning. The parting of the ways between Shakespeare and Kemp—ironically if unintentionally mirrored in Hal’s icy repudiation of Falstaff—was a rejection not only of a certain kind of comedy but also a declaration that from here on in, it was going to be a playwright’s and not an actor’s theater, no matter how popular the actor. (p.37)

Given Shakespeare’s finely tuned poetic and ironic sensibilities, I can’t imagine that Hal’s rejection of Falstaff mirroring his own rejection of Kemp was lost on him. In fact, his rejection of Kemp might have inspired him to develop the rejection theme in HV, though in HIV,p2 (2.1.208-17), Prince Hal does tell the audience of his masterplan to come out and shine…does this mean that Shakespeare planned this breaking with Kemp as long ago as the writing of HIV,p2?

Ireland, the Death of Edmund Spenser, and the Earl of Essex

In 1598, Elizabeth sent a force to Ireland to subdue the latest uprising. B ecause she was tight with money and relied on conscripted forces instead of a regular (aka paid) army or mercenaries. The English were soundly beaten at the Battle of Blackwater, and the Earl of Essex (a young, brash, handsome, arrogant favorite/lover of the queen) was raising troops to return for vengeance. Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth reflects many of the issues surrounding this proposed Irish expedition, including the morality of invading another country, the injustices and corruption associated with conscripting an army (also shown in HIV, p2), and the dangers of a military man being so successful that his ambitions are fueled to the point of insurrection, a theme that Shakespeare would fully explore in his next play, Julius Caesar.

Edmund Spenser was a marked contrast to Shakespeare—he totally embraced the role of poet to a patron, and was rewarded with lands in Ireland, which he lost during the 1598 uprising by the Irish against their English overlords. Shakespeare, while he allowed some patronage, pursued his own path as playwright within a group of players, rising to an ownership position of the troupe as well as the theater itself (i.e., the Globe that was currently under construction)—with his proceeds, he bought lands and a house in his hometown in the very English Stratford-upon-Avon. Spenser died unexpectedly in January, 1599 at the age of 46, and was interred at Westminster Abbey. Poets carried his hearse, and poems, instead of flowers, were tossed into his grave. According to Shapiro, “It’s unlikely that many of London’s writers would have missed the occasion…” to pen a poem in praise of Spenser but he asserts that Shakespeare probably did as he “had a strong aversion to heaping praise on the work of the living or the dead.” P. 70 Shapiro imagines that Shakespeare, who probably would have attended the funeral, might have wandered into the Chantry Chapel where HV and the remains of his wife, Queen Katherine, are buried, which is near where Spenser was being interred. Given that he is currently completing his play on HV, this seems more than likely. “Like Spenser, Henry V, who died at age thirty-five—Shakespeare’s current age—had not lived to fulfill his great promise.” In HVI, p1, written about ten years earlier, Shakespeare had staged HV’s funeral, in which mourners compare him to Julius Caesar. Now that Shakespeare was finally finishing HV itself, it seems more than coincidence that he produced JC next and that the two became even more an artistic extension of each other.

On February 20, Shakespeare and the rest of the Chamberlain’s Men performed in Richmond, and Shapiro speculates that Shakespeare most likely would have stayed in Richmond to hear a sermon ushering in Lent that was delivered by Lancelot Andrewes, “arguably England’s greatest preacher in an age notable for its oratory. For Shakespeare that morning in court would offer a chance to hear and study a remarkable performer.” (p.77) The title of Andrewes’s sermon was Preached before Queen Elizabeth at Richmond, On the 21st of February, A.D. 1599, being Ash Wednesday, at What Time the Earl of Essex was Going Forth, upon the Expedition for Ireland.

When scholars talk about the sources of Shakespeare’s plays, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles…But Shakespeare’s was an aural culture…Lost to us are the unrecorded sounds reverberating around him—street cries of vendors, church bells, regional and foreign accents, scraps of overheard conversations, and countless bits of speech and noise…Some of these made their way into Shakespeare’s writing…Only a tiny percentage of Elizabethan sermons were committed to print, so it’s a stroke of luck that Andrewes’s war sermon was one of them, for the evidence suggests that elements of it inspired (or uncannily paralleled) the play that Shakespeare was now completing. (p. 81)

It’s worth reading Shapiro’s analysis of the speech alongside HV’s St. Crispian’s Day speech in both style—the “thumping reiteration of ‘this time’ and ‘this day’”—and in the arguments that justify an “aggressive offensive war.” According to Shapiro, Ireland “haunts Shakespeare’s play….” and “seeps into the play at the most unexpected and even unintended moments.” (p. 88)

In fact, in the final act, Shakespeare speaks overtly and not in illusion to the imminent Irish campaign. Interestingly, this speech (Chorus, 5.0.22-35) also includes a reference to Caesar. “As we shift perspective from Henry’s triumphant return to Julius Caesar’s to Essex’s, then back to Henry’s, much gets blurred…” and is disquieting. (p. 89)

Back to the critics’ dismissal of HV as an important play. According to Shapiro, “Those seeking to pinpoint Shakespeare’s political views in Henry the Fifth will always be disappointed…” (p. 91) because “what they overlook is that all the debate about the war is the real story.” (p. 92) “Conquest, national identity, and mixed origins—the obsessive concerns of Elizabethan Irish policy—run deep through Henry the Fifth and sharply distinguish it from previous English accounts of Henry’s reign.” (p. 98)

Perhaps this is what I personally love about HV, now that I’ve read about it in context, it demonstrates in microcosm the genius of Shakespeare in taking a schoolboy’s story and adding depth and breadth and relevance to it both for his own contemporary audience and for those that followed. For that, I can forgive lapses in continuity.

Pick a Cathedral, Any Cathedral

With only three days in the Dublin area, and one of them consumed with a trip to Newgrange, we knew that we couldn't see or do everything, most things, or even a fraction of the sites worth visiting in the area. So we decided to only visit one of the two cathedrals within blocks of each other in Dublin. Christ Church Cathedral won the coin toss, so to speak, and just getting to see the mummified cat and rat made me very happy.



The theory is that a cat chased a rat into the pipes of the organ, got stuck, and nature did the rest. James Joyce did his bit too with regards to immortalizing the mummified pair in a simile in Finnegan's Wake: as stuck as that cat to that mouse in that tube of that christchurch organ...

I loved the floors and the ceilings and the windows too, but the crypt was enchanting. First one I've ever been in. Brought Romeo and Juliet to mind, with the monuments and dim passageways.



According to the pamphlet that came with the self-guided audio tour (of which I am a huge fan...when there isn't a live tour guide, I always go the audio route), these are the foundations of the earliest cathedral built on the site circa 1030 A.D.

After finishing the audio, we made our way to a different part of the Cathedral that is hosting Dublinia, a sort of elementary school age exhibit on Dublin since the time of the Vikings. All I can think of to compare it to is the History of Starrs Hollow diorama that Taylor puts together in The Gilmore Girls. It was so lame that it was fun. Sarah and I were practically the only people there over the age of 10, not counting the teachers who were herding uniform-clad kids from room to room. We did enjoy chatting with this "Viking"--he turned out to be the only live exhibit. Every other exhibit consisted of Macy's mannequins dressed up in furs.



Here, he's imprinting silver coins with a dye on a hammer, and we actually learned a lot about early money as he snipped coins into half-pennies and quarter-pennies before our very eyes!

A big part of the fun of visiting a new place for me is not just seeing the sites, but seeing how "real" people (i.e., non-tourists) live. Sarah and I visited a couple of corner markets and browsed the aisles looking for the familiar and the unfamiliar, and invariably purchased new and interesting snackage items, including the ever popular Roast Chicken crisps, Prawn Cocktail crisps, Mars Planets (which we learned about from the dozen or more episodes of Friends we watched--Friends is sponsered by Mars Planets), and Galaxy chocolate bars (yum!).

We also daily stopped for ice-cream on our walk back to the hotel at the St. Stephens Green Shopping Center, which we both loved for inexpensive clothing stores (it was so warm we had to buy something other than jeans to wear), prom dress stores (Sarah found an awesome gold/black/white dress that was gorgeous but really pricey), phone stores (which we haunted while I was trying to get my iphone to work), and a decent food court.

Last photo for today:


One of my favorite songs that I sang to our kids when they were young was Molly Malone. I always sang:
In London's fair city,
where the girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone,
As she wheeled her wheel-barrow,
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, "Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!"

"Alive, alive, oh,
Alive, alive, oh",
Crying "Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh".

But, but...the Molly Malone statue is in Dublin. Good thing we have the Internet and Wikipedia.

Next posting...the musical pub crawl.

Travelogue: Dublin

If Dublin is an accurate reflection of Ireland, then the trinity of religion, Guiness, and Celtic pride still very much defines this lovely place for me. With either a church or a pub on virtually every corner, the middle of the streets are free for the statues of the Irish who rekindled the pride and made independence both politically and culturally possible.



For our first three nights, I chose Camden Court Hotel. While it doesn't have all the charm of a small hotel or B&B, it did give us plenty of space to unpack and adjust to not being in the U.S. Our first room was on the second floor, above a very busy street, and while Sarah, being all of 16, was able to sleep through anything in her jet-lagged state, I woke up regularly that first night...from both the noise and the heat. Yep, the heat. While we were in Dublin, Ireland was experiencing a heat wave. We enjoyed sunny skies for the three days we were in Dublin, and it was still sunny when we returned nine days later for the flight back to the U.S. On the second day, I asked whether the hotel had an open room on a higher floor and in a quieter spot--they did, and the next two days were bliss.



After our spring break trip to NYC, I became a big fan of the Hop On/Hop Off bus with live tour guide. This is a great way to get oriented, see the major sites, hear a local tell his/her stories about the town, and stay vertical while fighting jet lag. The Dublin Hop On/Hop Off bus was great--heard lots of Guinness jokes and lots of North/South of the Liffey jokes and learned a lot about the town itself. Basically all I know about Dublin I learned from reading Edward Rutherford's two-parter The Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga and The Rebels of Ireland: The Dublin Saga,so this was helpful for both of us.

Our first day of non-jet-lagged tour began with Trinity College and the Book of Kells. We opted for the guided tour of the college and congratulated ourselves repeatedly on going this route--for just a Euro or two, we were expertly guided by a recent graduate who told lots of stories about his time at Trinity, stories about students from the past, and offered strong opinions on the various architectural styles, from the ridiculous to the sublime. He turned us loose when we reached the Book of Kells exhibit.



This is the statue of George Salmon, Provost of Trinity College from 1888 until his death in 1904. Cutting and pasting from Wikipedia:

His deep conservatism led him to strongly oppose women receiving degrees from the University. He eventually agreed to dropping his veto in 1901 when the Board voted in favour of allowing women to enter the university, it was one of his last acts as Provost. Symbolically in January 1904, just after he died, the first women undergraduates were admitted.

According to our sweetheart of a guide, Salmon prophetically muttered something about women entering Trinity over his dead body...:)

On to the Book of Kells, the exhibit itself was really well done--interesting and well laid out and able to accommodate the hordes of people visiting at the same time we were. Actually, there are several other books on display and included in the exhibit along with the Book of Kells. We also saw and learned about the Book of Armagh and the Book of Durrow. As expected, it was very crowded around the display cases holding the actual books and a bit chaotic as there was no offical queue help (i.e., people just sort of shoved their way in when an opening occurred instead of there being a systematic roped path).



We also really enjoyed walking through the Long Room (i.e., the main chamber of the Old Library). The photo here is not one of ours as we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but it was definitely sacred ground. Musty, dusty, and I felt quite reverential. According the brochure I picked up, it is 65 metres long and houses around 200,000 of the Library's oldest books. According to the guide we picked up, the books are catalogued according to size, smallest to largest. I think he might have been joshing us as we couldn't see evidence that this was the case. They had a great exhibit of detective fiction down the center of the room--first edition Dickens (Bleak House), Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, etc.

Next posting...on to Christ Church Cathedral, ice cream, and Molly Malone.

None But You

I'm almost ready to start posting on my trip, at least I have the Dublin photos organized, which is half the battle. In the meantime, I wanted to post on the first book in a two-parter that tells the Persuasion story from Captain Wentworth's point of view.

I've been reading Susan Kaye's work online for years now, and it's a real treat to have the final polished version to read and enjoy other than on computer printouts.

None But You, (Frederick Wentworth, Captain: Book 1) tells the story from the time of the Laconia being decommisioned and Wentworth thrown on shore and into Kellynch to the immediate aftermath of Louisa jumping from the Cobb steps and missing Wentworth's arms and being rendered unconscious. The second book in the two-parter, For You Alone (Frederick Wentworth, Captain; Book 2),which I am currently reading finishes the story.

I love Kaye's writing style--crisp, detailed, and immensely satisfying. Her knowledge of the Navy and the life of Navy officers circa 1810 shines through, and she uses it to salt-and-pepper the romance of the story, making it savory instead of coy. I enjoy the rich backstory of Wentworth and his siblings. So often, sequels and retellings merely mirror the original. Susan Kaye presents fully imagined characters that stand on their own. Needless to say, I am completely swept off my feet by her Wentworth.

The only caveat, which I trust is corrected in the second of the two books, is that we don't see enough of Anne Elliot to really get why he never got over her--we hear that she is thoughtful, kind, intelligent, and lovely, but I have yet to see her in action to form my own opinion.



If you love Persuasion, and who doesn't, then I can heartily recommend Susan Kaye's look at the good captain that we all swoon over.

Back from Travels...Won Kreativ Blogger Award in Absentia

The Kreativ Blogger Award has been awarded to Reading, Writing, Working, Playing by The Anne Boleyn Files (if you haven't checked out this amazing site, I urge you to do so!).

Thanks, Claire, for the award--such a pleasant surprise to find this in my comments when I logged on this morning.

The award guidelines are that on receiving the award you must post 7things you love and then give the award to 7 other bloggers who are creative. So, here goes!

7 Things I love
1. My family - husband, kids, parents, brothers and sister and all their spousal units and kids and so forth!
2. Reading and writing (and working and playing) - a world without words is one that I cannot imagine
3. History
4. Traveling and coming home
5. The third rock from the sun and the little spot on it known as Colorado - it is so beautiful, a gem in the Milky Way
6. Tea with milk and honey
7. Gardening and cooking with my garden produce - there is no better way to feel connected to the earth

7 Blogs that Deserve the Kreativ Blogger Award (in no particular order):
1. BooksPlease - always interesting, whether Margaret is writing or posting photos or artwork, it's lovely to look at and thought-provoking
2. Elegant Extracts - funny, interesting, quirky, Theresa's blog is a joy
3. You Can Never Have Too Many Books - Susan and I have such similar taste in books...always a pleasure to see what I'll be reading next :)
4. Willow Manor - I've just started visiting this blog but the range of topics and art/photos makes it always a worthwhile time spent.
5. Bellsknits - I don't knit anymore but I love to visit this blog and admire the work and taste and passion that goes into the blog and the items she's made.
6. Echostains - another blog that is new to me but blows me away with the creativity on display. Cool, cool, cool.
7. My Cozy Book Nook - another new edition to the blogs I visit. Molly writes about books a bit differently from the norm, and I like that!

Off on Vacation

There is so much to write about 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, but I'll have to wait until I get back from my Ireland/UK trip in a couple of weeks. I had the best of intentions, but ran out of steam.

Off to Dublin tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be able to post thoughts and photos along the way.

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

I finally got started on A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.), which I learned about from Nick Hornby. It is as terrific as I had hoped. I love the premise--instead of doing a traditional birth-to-death bio, author James Shapiro, examines Shakespeare's life and works indepth during the course of one critical year, 1599. He explores not only what Shakespeare himself was up to (and this was arguably the most important year in his career), but also the weather, what people were eating, discusssing, the current political situation, what preachers were preaching about, etc. Shapiro puts Shakespeare in context, which is probably the most important task in analyzing a life and works.

So what was Shakespeare up to in 1599? Well, he wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, and drafted Hamlet. And that was in his spare time at night, when he wasn't acting, directing, and generally managing the business affairs of his acting troupe. For all of those people who worry about what Shakespeare was doing in London away from his wife, it looks like he was working. There's an old saw that success is 10% talent and 90% hard work. I won't discount the genius that was Shakespeare, but he did work hard.

Now on to the really interesting notion that Shapiro leads with:

...cradle to grave biographers of Shakespeare tend to assume that what makes people who they are now, made people who they were then. Historians of sixteenth century England are not so sure. Because almost no one thought to write a memoir or keep a diary in Shakespeare's day...we don't know whether their emotional lives were like ours.

Their formative years certainly weren't. Strangers breast-fed infants, and babies were often swaddled for their first year. Childhood was brief, and most adolescents, rich and poor, were sent from home to live and serve in other households. Plague, death in childbirth, harvest failures, and high infant mortality rates may have diminished the intensity of family bonds...

Even constants such as love and marriage weren't the same...the meaning of key concepts, like what constitutes an "individual," was different....Given that this was an age of faith, or at the least, one in which church attendance was mandatory, religion, too, played a greater role in shaping how life, death, and the afterlife were imagined.

All this suggests that as much as we might want Shakespeare to have been like us, he wasn't. Conventional biographies of Shakespeare are necessary fictions that will always be with us--less for what they tell us about Shakespeare's life than for what they reveal about our fantasies of who we want Shakespeare to be.

This got me to thinking about other biographies--certainly most writers are not as illusive as Shakespeare, but how far back can we go before we can say that we really cannot understand an author because the worlds that we inhabit are just too different?

I would go so far as to say that, to paraphrase Shapiro, conventional biographies are necessary fictions--less for what they tell us about another's life than for what they reveal about our fantasies of who we want to be. Maybe this is why we read in general--reading for self-knowledge transcends reading bios.